There are many known sterilising techniques but many of these suffer from disadvantages such as poor sterilisation efficiency and the requirement of expensive and complex apparatus.
Initially, we refer to WO 2011/055113 which is incorporated herein by reference. This is a previous application by the present applicant but relates to a system only suitable for flexible packaging.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,834,948 is a conventional coaxial DBD ozone generator. However, the apparatus disclosed therein cannot produce ozone inside a sealed container. The invention disclosed therein is aimed at adding ozone to a flowing gas supplied by a pipe.
JP 2009218083 is a RF powered device operating at very high frequency (MHz-GHz), and again cannot generate ozone inside a pre-sealed container.
EP 1941912 A1 is again a completely different type of device utilising a combination of UV and IR radiation and electron impacts to sterilize objects, rather than chemical agents such as ozone.
US 20110123690 A1 is also a completely unrelated device that simply uses conventional thermal sterilisation on the sealed containers.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,892,611 B2 relates to the area of DBD plasmas but cannot treat a sealed vessel from the outside as an electrode would need to be inserted into the container for it to work.
It is an object of at least one aspect of the present invention to obviate or mitigate at least one or more of the aforementioned problems.
It is a further object of at least one aspect of the present invention to provide an improved sterilisation apparatus for rigid containers.
It is a yet further object of at least one aspect of the present invention to provide an improved method of sterilising rigid containers.